Thom Hartmann: Midnight Ride of the Rabble

Midnight Ride of the Rabble

To every Middlesex village and farm, A cry of
defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the
darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that
shall echo for evermore! For, borne on the
night-wind of the Past, Through all our history,
to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril
and need, The people will waken and listen to
hear. -- From Paul Revere's Ride by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863

Let's be blunt. The real agenda of the new conservatives is
nothing less than the destruction of democracy in the United
States of America. And feudalism is one of their weapons.

Their rallying cry is that government is the enemy, and thus
must be "drowned in a bathtub." In that, they've mistaken
our government for the former Soviet Union, or confused Ayn
Rand's fictional and disintegrating America with the real
thing.

The government of the United States is us.
It was designed to be a government of, by, and for We, the
People. It's not an enemy to be destroyed; it's a means by
which we administer and preserve the commons that we
collectively own.

Nonetheless, the new
conservatives see our democratic government as the enemy.
And if they plan to destroy democracy, they must have
something in mind to replace it with. (Yes, I know that
"democracy" and "democratic" sound too much like "Democrat,"
and so the Republicans want us to say that we don't live in
a democracy, but, rather, a republic, which sounds more like
"Republican." It was one of Newt's efforts, along with
replacing phrases like "Democratic Senator" with "Democrat
Senator." But Republican political correctness can take a
leap: we're talking here about the survival of democracy in
our constitutional republic.)

What conservatives
are really arguing for is a return to the three historic
forms of tyranny that the Founders and Framers identified,
declared war against, and fought and died to keep out of our
land. Those tyrants were kings, theocrats, and noble feudal
lords.

Kings would never again be allowed to
govern America, the Founders said, so they stripped the
president of the power to declare war. As Lincoln noted in
an 1848 letter to William Herndon: "Kings had always been
involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending
generally, if not always, that the good of the people was
the object. This, our [1787] Convention understood to be the
most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved
to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the
power of bringing this oppression upon us."

Theocrats would never again be allowed to govern America, as
they had tried in the early Puritan communities. In 1784,
when Patrick Henry proposed that the Virginia legislature
use a sort of faith-based voucher system to pay for
"Christian education," James Madison responded with
ferocity, saying government support of church teachings
"will be a dangerous abuse of power." He added, "The Rulers
who are guilty of such an encroachment exceed the commission
from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The
People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by
themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are
slaves."

And America was not conceived of as a
feudal state, feudalism being broadly defined as "rule by
the super-rich." Rather, our nation was created in large
part in reaction against centuries of European feudalism. As
Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his lecture titled The Fortune
of the Republic, delivered on December 1, 1863, "We began
with freedom. America was opened after the feudal mischief
was spent. No inquisitions here, no kings, no nobles, no
dominant church."

The great and revolutionary
ideal of America is that a government can exist while
drawing its authority, power, and ongoing legitimacy from a
single source: "The consent of the governed." Conservatives,
however, would change all that.

In their brave new
world, corporations are more suited to governance than are
the unpredictable rabble called citizens. Corporations
should control politics, control the commons, control health
care, control our airwaves, control the "free" market, and
even control our schools. Although corporations can't vote,
these new conservatives claim they should have human rights,
like privacy from government inspections of their political
activity and the free speech right to lie to politicians and
citizens in PR and advertising. Although corporations don't
need to breathe fresh air or drink pure water, these new
conservatives would hand over to them the power to
self-regulate poisonous emissions into our air and water.

While these new conservatives claim corporations should have
the rights of persons, they don't mind if corporations use
hostile financial force to take over other, smaller
corporations in a bizarre form of corporate slavery called
monopoly. Corporations can't die, so aren't subject to
inheritance taxes or probate. They can't be put in prison,
so even when they cause death they are only subject to
fines.

Corporations and their CEOs are America's
new feudal lords, and the new conservatives are their
obliging servants and mouthpieces. The conservative mantra
is: "Less government!" But the dirty little secret of the
new conservatives is that just as nature abhors a vacuum, so
also do politics and power. Every time government of, by,
and for We, the People is pushed out of administering some
part of this nation's vast commons, corporations step in.
And by swamping the United States of America in debt with
so-called "tax cuts," they seek to force an increasingly
desperate government to cede more and more of our commons to
their corporate rule.

Conservatives confuse
efficiency and cost: They suggest that big corporations can
perform public services at a lower total cost than
government, while ignoring the corporate need to pad the
bill with dividends to stockholders, rich CEO salaries,
corporate jets and headquarters, advertising, millions in
"campaign contributions," and cash set-asides for growth and
expansion. They want to frame this as the solution of the
"free market," and talk about entrepreneurs and small
businesses filling up the holes left when government lets go
of public property.

But these are straw man
arguments: What they are really advocating is corporate
rule, and ultimately a feudal state controlled exclusively
by the largest of the corporations. Smaller corporations,
like individual humans and the governments they once hoped
would protect them from powerful feudal forces, can watch
but they can't play.

The modern-day conservative
movement began with Federalists Alexander Hamilton and John
Adams, who argued that for a society to be stable it must
have a governing elite, and this elite must be separate both
in power and privilege from what Adams referred to as "the
rabble." Their Federalist party imploded in the early 19th
Century, in large part because of public revulsion over
Federalist elitism, a symptom of which was Adams' signing
the Alien and Sedition Acts. (If you've only read the
Republican biographies of John Adams, you probably don't
remember these laws, even though they were the biggest thing
to have happened in Adams' entire four years in office, and
the reason why the citizens of America voted him out of
office, and voted Jefferson - who loudly and publicly
opposed the Acts - in. They were a 1797 version of the
Patriot Act and Patriot II, with startlingly similar
language.)

Destroyed by their embrace of this
early form of despotism, the Federalists were replaced first
in the early 1800s by the short-lived Whigs and then,
starting with Lincoln, by the modern-day Republicans, who,
after Lincoln's death, firmly staked out their ancestral
Federalist position as the party of wealthy corporate and
private interests. And now, under the disguise of the word
"conservative" (classical conservatives like Teddy Roosevelt
and Dwight Eisenhower are rolling in their graves), these
old-time feudalists have nearly completed their takeover of
our great nation.

It became obvious with the
transformation of healthcare into a for-profit industry,
leading to spiraling costs (and millions of dollars for Bill
Frist and his ilk). Insurance became necessary for survival,
and people were worried. Bill Clinton was prepared to answer
the concern of the majority of Americans who supported
national health care. But that would harm corporate
profits.

"Do you want government bureaucrats
deciding which doctor you can see?" asked the conservatives,
over and over again. As a yes/no question, the answer was
pretty simple for most Americans: no. But, as is so often
the case when conservatives try to influence public opinion,
the true issue wasn't honestly stated.

The real
question was: "Do you want government bureaucrats - who are
answerable to elected officials and thus subject to the will
of 'We, The People' - making decisions about your
healthcare, or would you rather have corporate bureaucrats -
who are answerable only to their CEOs and work in a
profit-driven environment - making decisions about your
healthcare?"

For every $100 that passes through
the hands of the government-administered Medicare programs,
between $2 and $3 is spent on administration, leaving $97 to
$98 to pay for medical services and drugs. But of every $100
that flows through corporate insurance programs and HMOs,
$10 to $24 sticks to corporate fingers along the way. After
all, Medicare doesn't have lavish corporate headquarters,
corporate jets, or pay expensive lobbying firms in
Washington to work on its behalf. It doesn't "donate"
millions to politicians and their parties. It doesn't pay
profits in the form of dividends to its shareholders. And it
doesn't compensate its top executive with over a million
dollars a year, as do each of the largest of the American
insurance companies. Medicare has one primary mandate: serve
the public. Private corporations also have one primary
mandate: generate profit.

When Jeb Bush cut a deal
with Enron to privatize the Everglades, it diminished the
power of the Florida government to protect a natural
resource and enhanced the power and profitability of Enron.
Similarly, when politicians argue for harsher sentencing
guidelines and also advocate more corporate-owned prisons,
they're enhancing the power and profits of one of America's
fastest-growing and most profitable remaining domestic
industries: incarceration. But having government protect the
quality of the nation's air and water by mandating pollution
controls doesn't enhance corporate profits. Neither does
single-payer health-care, which threatens insurance
companies with redundancy, or requirements for local control
of broadcast media. In these and other regards, however, the
government still holds the keys to the riches of the commons
held in trust for us all. Riches the corporations want to
convert into profits.

For example, an NPR Morning
Edition report by Rick Carr on 28 May 2003 said, "Current
FCC Chair Michael Powell says he has faith the market will
provide. What's more, he says, he'd rather have the market
decide than government." In this, Powell was reciting the
conservative mantra. Misconstruing Adam Smith, who warned
about the dangers of the invisible hand of the marketplace
trampling the rights and needs of the people, Powell
suggests that business always knows best. The market will
decide. Bigger isn't badder.

But experience shows
that the very competition that conservatives claim to
embrace is destroyed by the unrestrained growth of corporate
interests. It's called monopoly: Big fish eat little fish,
over and over, until there are no little fish left. Look at
the thoroughfares of any American city and ask yourself how
many of the businesses there are locally owned. Instead of
cash circulating within a local and competitive economy, at
midnight every night a button is pushed and the local money
is vacuumed away to Little Rock or Chicago or New York.

This is feudalism in its most raw and naked form, just as
the kings and nobles of old sucked dry the resources of the
people they claimed to own. It is in these arguments for
unrestrained corporatism that we see the naked face of
Hamilton's Federalists in the modern conservative movement.
It's the face of wealth and privilege, of what Jefferson
called a "pseudo-aristocracy," that works to its own
enrichment and gain regardless of the harm done to the
nation, the commons, or the "We, the People" rabble.

It is, in its most complete form, the face that would "drown
government in a bathtub"; that sneers at the First Amendment
by putting up "free speech zones" for protesters; that
openly and harshly suggests that those who are poor,
unemployed, or underemployed are suffering from character
defects. That works hard to protect the corporate interest,
but is happy to ignore the public interest. That says it
doesn't matter what happens to the humans living in what a
national conservative talk show host laughingly calls "turd
world nations."

These new conservatives would have
us trade in our democracy for a corporatocracy, a form of
feudal government most recently reinvented by Benito
Mussolini when he recommended a "merger of business and
state interests" as a way of creating a government that
would be invincibly strong. Mussolini called it fascism.

In a previous Common Dreams op-ed, I pointed out how media
and other corporations will suck up to government when they
think they can get regulations that will enhance their
profits. We see this daily in the halls of Congress and in
the lobbying efforts directed at our regulatory agencies. We
see it in the millions of dollars in trips and gifts given
to FCC commissioners, that in another era would have been
called bribes.

These corporate-embracing
conservatives are not working for what's best for democracy,
for America, or for the interests of "We, The People." They
are explicitly interested in a singular goal: Profits and
the power to maintain them. Under control, the desire for
profit can be a useful thing, as 200 years of American free
enterprise have shown.

But unrestrained, as George
Soros warns us so eloquently, it will create monopoly and
destroy democracy. The new conservatives are systematically
dismantling our governmental systems of checks and balances;
of considering the public good when regulating private
corporate behavior; of protecting those individuals, small
businesses, and local communities who are unable to protect
themselves from giant corporate predators. They want to
replace government of, by, and for We, the People, with a
corporate feudal state, turning America's citizens into
their vassals and serfs.

Only a public revolt in
disgust over this unconscionable behavior will stop these
new conservatives from turning America into a
corporate-based clone of Mussolini's feudal vision. As
Longfellow reminds us, "In the hour of darkness and peril
and need/The people will waken and listen to hear.."

It is again that hour, and now is the time for we, the
rabble, to re-awaken our fellow citizens.

- Thom Hartmann (thom at
http://www.thomhartmann.com) is the author of over a
dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last
Hours of Ancient Sunlight," and the host of a nationally
syndicated daily talk show. www.thomhartmann.com This
article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is
granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached

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